Insurgency Gathers Steam

On June 28, 2004, sovereignty was officially
returned to Iraq. Former exile and Iraqi Government Council member Iyad
Allawi became prime minister of the Iraqi interim government, and Ghazi
al-Yawar, a Sunni Muslim, was chosen president.

On July 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a unanimous bipartisan report, concluding that “most of the major key judgments”
on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or
were not supported by, the underlying intelligence report.” The
report also stated that there was no “established formal
relationship” between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The following
week, Britain's Butler report on prewar intelligence echoed the American
findings.

Iraq's Jan. 30, 2005, elections to select a
275-seat national assembly went ahead as scheduled, and a total of 8.5
million people voted, representing about 58% of eligible Iraqis. A
coalition of Shiites, the United Iraq Alliance, received 48% of the vote,
the Kurdish parties received 26% of the vote, and the Sunnis just
2%—most Sunni leaders had called for a boycott. In April, Jalal
Talabani, a Kurd, became president, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a religious
Shiite, became prime minister. The elections, however, did not stem the
insurgency, which grew increasingly sectarian during 2005 and
predominantly involved Sunni insurgents targeting Shiite and Kurdish
civilians in suicide bombings. The death toll for Iraqi civilians is
estimated to have reached 30,000 since the start of the war.

By December 2005, more than 2,100 U.S. soldiers
had died in Iraq and more than 15,000 had been wounded. The absence of a
clear strategy for winning the war beyond “staying the course”
caused Americans' support for Bush's handling of the war to wane. The
U.S. and Iraqi governments agreed that no firm timetable for the
withdrawal of U.S. troops should be set, maintaining that this would
simply encourage the insurgency. Withdrawal would take place as Iraqi
security forces grew strong enough to assume responsibility for the
country's stability. “As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand
down,” Bush stated. But the training of Iraqi security forces went
far more slowly than anticipated. A July 2005 Pentagon report acknowledged
that only “a small number” of Iraqi security forces were
capable of fighting the insurgency without American help.